Thurs: watched
For 400 gallons
As conceptual poetry
Project, wrote
Some until bored,
Asphyxiation comes
In waves or
Bleeds in,
I slide over

Sat: went to reading
Out here where Slick
Can’t get me, good
House music & 2
Well-trained lyricists
Admitted same over
The course of approx.
1,500 gallons

Somebody said you
Smoke to imitate
Stalemate: btw breath /
Undertow, oil / water,
Life / remedy. But
The way it billows
Like a housefire, or
As if Detroit
Had been
Outsourced
To the sea

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STATEMENT

Beyond (or in addition to) the poem itself, how might we, as loosely but less loosely than last week, use, i.e., further activate, our affective labors in regard to this catastrophe? In the form of resistance that isn’t duplicative of, say, the essential activist work many of us are already engaged in? Poets for Living Waters is one instance, among very few, it seems to me, that brings “poetry” and “politics” together such that the terms are infected by one another, torqued, in and thru a collective/collaborative effort. How might we act on the wounds this catastrophe has imprinted on us such that the terms of woundedness themselves are re-articulated, outsourced as affective labors acting in concert with other labors? Move (maybe continue to move?) from Poets for Living Waters to People for Living Waters, hooking up (as the editors have begun to do) systematically with people/organizations from other disciplines, backgrounds, identifications. The poems here, even in terms of the volume of work, help to re-articulate (or even articulate) these terms, imbue ecological crisis with truly ecological implications (it isn’t just the fish and fisheries that are going to suffer–not that this isn’t enough to act). But from this substantial poetic collaboration to what?

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David Wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, a former union organizer, and participant in Nonsite Collective. His book, Occultations, has just been released by Black Radish Books. Other recent books are Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), Hospitalogy (Scantily Clad Press, forth.), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). Critical work on the poetics of spatial practice is forthcoming from Jacket and Sibila: Poesia y Cultura (Brazil) and poetry can or will be found in Aufgabe, Ekleksographia, 5_Trope, Little Red Leaves, Dusie, and No Tell Motel. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking. Visit him at http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/